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Suddenly, Washington is awash in nostalgia for the safety
and security of the Cold War. Mutual assured destruction,
MAD as it was and for all of the terror it inspired in the
imagination, was based on reason and logic.

When Jack Kennedy told Nikita Khrushchev he would
not allow Russian missiles in Cuba, and made him believe it,
the Russians turned their ships around. The gamble paid off
because both sides knew the rules of the game. When Ronald
Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit that
he would never give up the Strategic Defense Initiative, the
Soviet leader, with a hard-headed understanding of the
economics of an arms race he couldn't win, threw in his
cards. We didn't know it at the time but it was the beginning
of the end of the Cold War.

When the Berlin Wall fell, lifting the Iron Curtain at last,
we indulged in a false optimism of cliches. It was the end of
history, the end of irony, the end of fear as we had known it.
But a new fear has replaced it, an amorphous anxiety and
apprehension residing in ordinary life where innocent men,
women and children everywhere and anywhere are
threatened. Terror stalks us at work and play, on Wall Street,
the Pentagon and even in a pleasure palace in Bali.

A sniper in Washington acts as a symbol of this terror,
shooting a man pumping gasoline into the tank of his taxi, a
woman loading a car with household goods for a new
apartment, a man mowing a lawn. The very ordinariness
suggests the theater of the absurd. Human activity is deprived
of meaning; the irrational dominates, creating chaos in the
commonplace.

The motives driving terrorism may be political, but they
rationalize irrationality. What, to a rational mind, is the point
of killing men and women enjoying themselves at a resort far
from home? American intelligence analysts identify the
terrorists as linked to al Qaeda, but what can these evil men
gain beyond the spreading of fear?

The rumor on "the street" in Indonesia, the most populous
Muslim nation, is that the death and destruction were the
work of Americans. "Extraordinary as this seems in the West,
many Indonesians are convinced that the United States
sponsored the Bali bombing in order to convince reluctant
governments to join its war on terror and support an attack
on Iraq," writes Sidney Jones, director of the Indonesian
project of the International Crisis Group, in the New York
Times. This is absurd to us, but similar to the tale that the
destruction of the World Trade Center was the work of
Israel and the perfidious Jews, and taken as fact on the Arab
Street. (It still is.)

Only benighted religious belief could drive fanatics to this
kind of terror, kindling the wrath of Islamists against what
they perceive as secular decadence. The West is identified
with physical pleasure on this earth; the Islamists are storing
up pleasure for the next world. The wine, women and song at
the Sari Club is seen as deathly depravity, and murderous
acts against such abominations are sacred missions in the
purification of this earth. There may not have been many
virgins at the Sari Club, but many are waiting to be despoiled
by fanatics in Islamic heaven. We can't understand it because
it's a chaos of mirrors of the mind.

The regiments of peace at any price - we have seen the
price of peace writ large once more - argue that dealing
with Saddam Hussein will incite more Muslim fanaticism,
giving the terrorists greater incentive to enlist in the cause of al
Qaeda. But we have seen that there are enough now to
destroy our way of life. Tony Blair put it right, that dealing
with an Iraq with deadly weapons is not a distraction from the
fight against terrorism: "Some say that we should fight
terrorism alone and that the issues to do with weapons of
mass destruction are a distraction. I reject that entirely. Both,
though different in means, are the same in nature. Both are the
new threats facing the post-Cold War world. Both are threats
from people of states who do not care about human life, who
have no compunction about killing the innocent. Both
represent the extreme replacing the rational, the fanatic
driving out moderation."

Fear is useless if it does not lead us to action. We're in a
new age of fear - of the sniper's gun, the terrorist's bomb
and a madman's weapons of mass destruction. This should
galvanize us to act with resolution, armed with reason and
logic.